LYNCHING, KKK, STRANGE FRUITJAKE, SOPHIE, GEORGIA

LYNCHING

KKK – KU KLUX KLAN Six college students founded the Ku Klux Klan between

December 1865 and the summer of 1866 in the town of Pulaski, Tennessee.

During the next two years Klansmen wearing masks, white cardboard hats and draped in white sheets, tortured and killed black Americans and

sympathetic whites.

Between 1868 and 1870 the Ku Klux Klan played an important role in

restoring white rule in North Carolina, Tennessee and Georgia.

The operations of the Klan are executed in the night and are invariably directed against members of the Republican Party. The Klan is inflicting summary vengeance on the colored citizens of these citizens by breaking into their houses at the dead of night, dragging them from their beds, torturing them in the most inhuman manner, and in

many instances murdering.

"Strange Fruit" is a song performed most famously by Billie Holiday in 1939. It was written by the teacher Abel Meeropol as a poem, it exposed American

racism, particularly the lynching of African Americans.

In the poem, Meeropol expressed his horror at lynchings, possibly after having seen Lawrence

Beitler's photograph of the 1930 lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith in Marion, Indianaa.

STRANGE FRUIT